Take a Trip to Avenue Q — "Q" Stands for Quirky & Quite Funny

We were drawn to the Wilmington Drama League by the intrigue of what a pal described as “…an adult version of Sesame Street.” How could we pass that up?

Avenue Q: The Musical — book by Jeff Whitty and music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx — opened off-Broadway in March 2003 and subsequently won Tony® Awards for Best Musical, Best Score and Best Book.  In short, it’s the story of a dysfunctional mix of people and puppets who whine, curse, say racist things, drink, surf the ‘Net for porn, and have puppet sex.  But it’s also a tale of friendship, community, relationships and the love that holds it all together.  Welcome to Avenue Q, a place where humans and puppets live in hilarious harmony and Gary Coleman — yes, Gary Coleman — is the building Super.

As the show begins, we meet Princeton (played splendidly by Jason Tokarski, who gives the puppet a boyish, naïve charm), a recent college grad who moves to the big city. Since he’s an English major without a job, he can’t afford to live anywhere but the apartments on Avenue Q.  Here, meets his new “family” — an entertaining array of human and puppet neighbors including Brian (Shawn Kline) and Christmas Eve, his Asian-American therapist fiancée (Suzanne J. Stein); roommates Rod and Nicky (Ernie-and-Bert types played by Jim Burns and Anthony Vitalo, respectively); Trekkie Monster (Nick D’Argenio) and his friend-maybe-more Kate Monster (no relation to Trekkie; not all monsters are related…what are you, racist?). Their lives' complexities ensue, as they all try to find their ‘purposes’ in life.

Kate Monster (Regina Dzielak) is a gentle, compassionate creature that longs for career success, to fulfill her dreams and to find love. Dzielak plays her with humor and vulnerability, her voice sweet and lovely as she sings about Princeton’s “Mix Tape” and the place between friendship and love in “There’s a Fine, Fine Line.”

There were highlights aplenty for me, including Burns’ role as Rod, the impossibly-uptight-possibly-gay-Republican roomie to Vitalo’s Nicky. Burns’ performance — especially in “If You Were Gay” and “My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada” — was ROFL funny.  Also delivering side-splitting laughs is Nick D’Argenio as Trekkie Monster, with inappropriate interjections and his performance in “The Internet is for Porn.”  He’s every guy’s guy in a Cookie Monster form.  And, stealing more than one scene are Katie Brady and Chrissy Stief as the Bad Idea Bears — they’re cute, they're cuddly, they’re pure evil and they’re funny as hell.

Tommy Fisher-Klein has a solid comedic performance as “Gary Coleman,” sliding in and out of scenes with quick-witted jabs and reactions that make you laugh out loud. He gives us another highlight (and set-up to the aforementioned puppet sex) with “You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You’re Making Love).” The entire scene had the audience hooting.

As mentioned, the cast is a mix of real-life actors and actors, dressed in black to minimize “obstruction,” maneuvering large-scale hand puppets.  At times, it was a bit challenging for me to shift between watching the puppets versus the actors themselves.  However, the performer who made it most seamless was Shelli Ezold as Lucy the Slut.  Ezold does an incredible job in her movement and manner, placing your focus on Lucy’s, um, assets while delivering a power-packed sexpot of a character with her gorgeous, sultry voice.  

Directed by Wayne Meadows, the show is accented with “Sesame-like” multimedia features, as well as fun audience interaction, and I was pleased to see that Meadows chose a live orchestra for music.  The first act moves quickly with the most raucous songs and activity; the second act is a bit slower but still enjoyable.  We sat in the front center row, but I don’t recommend it for everyone…I think the sightlines are a bit better further back in the theater. (Although you’ll miss getting picked on by the cast, which was a riot.) 

While I don’t necessarily wish I lived on Avenue Q, I absolutely loved visiting with its quirky residents, who made me glad that my life doesn’t suck as much as theirs.  Decide for yourself — the show runs through October 6!

See wilmingtondramaleague.org.

At Chapel Street, it's Hitchcock with a Twist

The Chapel Street Players have never backed down from putting on challenging shows, but THE 39 STEPS poses a special kind of challenge: Take a 1935 Alfred Hitchcock movie and recreate it on stage using just four actors and a few props. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s got well more than four characters. And multiple settings, including the outside of a moving train, the Scottish countryside, and the London Palladium. The sometimes mad dash to deliver almost every line in the film and change the set to fit the scenes is hilarious, and you end up with something that is part tribute, part parody, and very funny throughout. 

Taking on the roles are Tom Trietly, in the only single-character role as Richard Hannay,  a hapless Englishman who finds himself a murder suspect after inviting a doomed German spy to stay at his home for the night. She’s the first of three love interests for the “dashing, wavy-haired” Hannay, all played by Anna Keane, who delivers over-melodramatic (as intended) spy, sheltered country wife, and 1930s firecracker smoothly. All of the other characters are played by Bethany Miller, billed as “Clown 1,” and Andrew Dluhy, as “Clown 2.” Despite their minor-sounding billing, these two carry the show with a rapid-fire succession of characters, including vaudeville performers, police, spies, train conductors, and townsfolk of all kinds. Often within the same scene, with more than one of their characters present. There’s plenty of gender-bending and over-the-top accents, with Miller stealing most of her scenes.

Trietly is goofily charming as Hannay, presenting the protagonist as a sympathetic, relatively normal guy thrown into a world of thrills and intrigue. 

Few shows are as fast-paced and fun as THE 39 STEPS, and CSP’s four stars deliver the entertaining show it’s meant to be. If you don’t think of Hitchcock as fun, you’re in for surprise. You may never look at his (often darkly comic) classic films the same way again.

The 39 Steps runs from September 20 - 28, 2013. To purchase tickets, go to chapelstreetplayers.org/

This review was originally published in Stage Magazine.

Copeland Quartet opens new series at Church of the Holy City

It was a delight to see the Copeland String Quartet in their eleventh year – because you can feel that they have invested enough time to coordinate in that magic extra-sensory perception chamber groups get after years of performing together. 

 

They courageously chose three pieces by composers not known for their chamber catalogs and the results were mixed.  For me, the Copeland’s interpretation of Hugo Wolf’s wild and raucous Italian Serenade was too tame and too cautious.  Wolf was trying to make music representing a rebellious soldier wooing a damsel aggressively and I felt this damsel would have been underwhelmed.  And yet, the exploration of the unknown was intriguing.

 

The second piece was a lush, romantic short piece by Giacomo Puccini, Crisantemi, which he wrote for a funeral but which today would be the sort of movie theme patrons buy and take home and play again and again.  The beautiful melodic lines were played freely and with great expression by first violinist Eliezer Gutman and the group provided the support and countermelodies as if they were thinking the same thoughts and breathing the same rhythm. 

The third and last piece on the program was a surprising string quartet which Giuseppe Verdi wrote in Naples while waiting for the soprano in Aida to recover from an illness.  No surprise that this extremely operatic composer wrote a quartet that seemed like an opera.  Tom Jackson, second violin, got to lead the outer movements as if playing the alto role.  The first violin joined the duet and then the strings began to sound like the orchestral part!  The third movement gave cellist Mark Ward a chance to show off the singing high notes of the cello as his colleagues formed a pizzicato accompaniment.

The quartet played an encore which is on their third and latest CD, the Andante Espressivo  movement from Felix Mendelssohn’s Quartet in D Major, Opus 44, Nr. 1.  The group knows this piece well and played it with confidence, yet it seemed still fresh and alive. 

We are lucky to have a quartet with such longevity as the Copeland Quartet, like a fine wine, is definitely improving with age.

 

See www.copelandstringquartet.com